Meg Martin has been a Web producer at roanoke.com since April.

I'D GOTTEN TO WORK just before 8 a.m. that day - thought I might hit the ground running on my first full day in the newsroom. Check the e-mail, write the to-do list, go over my notes.

And then: A phone call from the bureau. There'd been a shooting in a dorm. Tech on lock down. A gunman on the loose. Possible domestic dispute. We'd need Web site updates. Locator maps. Message boards.

At 9:44 a.m., the first report went up. A brief: Multiple shootings have occurred at Virginia Tech this morning involving multiple victims. ... Police are on the scene and rescue workers have set up a temporary treatment facility.

Plan to stay late - very late - and get back early - predawn early. Remember: Right now we're sprinting, but it'll soon be a marathon. This is our story, our community, our people.

The copy flowed. And the videos. And the images and the updates and the multimedia.

We already had a running story, blog-style, updated by the minute. The next day we would print a 12-page special section. Sixteen pages the day after that. And then again throughout the week. Special sections

We needed a landing page: a map to all the stories we'd been telling. Something that would help the 261,000-plus visitors who'd been overloading our pages that first day find what they were looking for.

So, the stories were divided into categories: victims, treatment, shooting accounts, memorials. ...

We built an index page. Added updates throughout the day - and night. It began to breathe the story.

At least one member of the Web team was always, with the exception of a few quarter-hours here and there, in the newsroom. The rest of us were on call, shoehorning in the few hours of sleep that we could catch between shifts.

And we updated and updated and updated.

It stopped being about tags and hrefs. This was about instant history. We were creating a place where visitors could explore, experience and grieve.

We stared at the victims' faces for hours, read their guestbook entries, pored through their stories, and linked up the pieces of their lives - and deaths - that came across the copy desk. This was how we - and much of the world - would come to know them. Virginia Tech Shooting Victims

During the hours and weeks after the Virginia Tech shootings, I wasn't on campus or at the hospitals. I didn't talk to the victims' friends. I didn't knock on their parents' doors or sit in the back of their memorial services or drive to their hometowns as neighbors tied ribbons on trees.

At first, that felt awkward. How could I possibly stand to be sitting in the newsroom during a story of such magnitude - on my first day of work?

But as the story unfolded on the pages of our Web site - and then our newspaper - I realized something. We were creating living history with our code and our pixels. Our index pages gave context to the flood of stories that our colleagues were writing and photographing and editing and creating.

That index we created midafternoon on April 16 would become the narrative of Virginia Tech's tragedy and recovery.

And we're still updating. *